May 2, 2016 AT 10:00 am

3 women who radically changed the course of technology #WomenInSTEM

When we think of innovators of the technology space we largely think of blokes like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – the zeitgeist is largely male.

But that hasn’t always been the case. As a matter of fact, for the first decade or so programming was a ‘pink-collar’ industry. The vast majority of early coders were women. What’s more, it’s an industry created by women. Two centuries ago (when computers were made of flywheels and cogs), Ada Lovelace was the matriarch behind programmable computers. The world’s first developer, who lay down the foundations for the future we’re currently living in, was a woman. Almost a hundred years after she published her seminal documents on programmable computers, Alan Turing used them as inspiration for the modern, electric machines we still use today.

Now however, for no discernable reason, just 20% of the Australian IT workforce are women. So in order to not forget the industry’s roots – and hopefully inspire more Australian women to start crunching code – we thought we’d remember three notable innovators who radically changed the course of technology as we know it.